How Do Recipes Reflect Language Change

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How do recipes reflect language change? One thing I noticed when reading all 3 recipes was that each one used different terms to measure quantity and size, the adjective used was less accurate and seemingly more vulgar in text one, which was the earliest, this was less apparent in texts two and three but a clear distinction was still there. We saw this in text one where words such as “shovel” and phrases such as “big as a walnut” were used to measure quantity, This was not surprising for a text from 1747 as the general populace at this age would not have been familiar with more precise measures of quantity due to lack of education and were more likely to have such ‘general’ concepts of quantity, such as how big a walnut is. We saw how quantity was measured differently in the second text from how “table-spoonfulls” replaced “tea spoonfulls” in the first text, and how “spoon” now replaced “shovel” from the first text. This text was from 1852; a time when economy was dwindling so adjectives such as “economical” and “thrifty” which suggested a semantic field of money-saving now were more frequent in use, and small quantity measures such as a tablespoon were now present to replace the lesser precise ones from the earlier text. I believe this was due to the fact that books were expensive at that time for the economy, and not many middle-class people would be buying books at the time unless it saved them money. Text three however uses much smaller quantities such as grams and ounces. I believe this is due to technological advances which now enable us to precisely measure things and an increase of education in modern day which gives everyone basic knowledge of grams and micro quantities such as ounces. I found that there was also a positive correlation between the age of the text and the grammatical correctness of the syntax used. Use of non-standard syntax is apparent

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